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FATHER NORM IN THE NEWS
Published Monday, August 20, 2007 in the Orange County Register newspaper
http://www.ocregister.com/ocregister/news/local/article_1814633.php
Monday, August 20, 2007
By TOM BERG
THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
LAGUNA HILLS – He stands in an empty church, practicing. Always practicing. Ninety minutes every day, two mallets in each hand.
They fall gently on an old vibraphone he once rolled through the streets of Manhattan in another life. Another time. Back then a long-haired Norm Freeman played Broadway, Carnegie Hall, Madison Square Garden.
Now? He plays for a hundred people here. A hundred there. He leans over the instrument: Soft strains of "Stardust" lift to the vaulted church ceiling.
It's hard to believe he once played with the thrash-metal band Metallica. Or at the MTV Music Awards. Or on Saturday Night Live.
"Trying to prove myself in the music business ultimately left me feeling empty," says Freeman, 55, a husband and father of two. "It was from that place that I started a spiritual quest."
Now, each Sunday, this man who once played with Pavarotti, Paul McCartney and Leonard Bernstein plays the 9:30 a.m. service at St. George's Episcopal Church.
Which is why he was pleasantly surprised to get a call last year from an old friend he hadn't worked with in 12 years: How are your chops?his friend asked. You want to join us on tour – with Barbra Streisand?
Freeman was floored. He'd toured with Streisand in 1994, but so much had changed. He'd have to ask his wife. His friends at St. George's. His bishop.
See, he wasn't just the church vibraphonist on Sunday mornings. He was the priest.
BEYOND THE NOTES
The turning point came in 1988 at Carnegie Hall.
Freeman was one of New York's A-list musicians: He'd performed Broadway hits like "Grease" and "Showboat." Toured with rock keyboardist Rick Wakeman. Performed with the Moody Blues. And played percussion with the New York Philharmonic, New York Pops and Metropolitan Opera.
Legendary timpanist Saul Goodman took him aside at Juilliard School of Music.
"He taught us to reach down inside of ourselves, to come in touch with some power to inspire our playing," Freeman says. "So that what we'd bring to our performance was beyond the notes. It came up from deep inside of ourselves."
On this day Freeman was trying – as Leonard Bernstein conducted the New York Philharmonic for a gala event commemorating his debut as conductor – but failing.
Freeman was to introduce a passage by striking a solo chime precisely as the concertmaster began his violin solo. "At rehearsal, we weren't together and it was my fault," Freeman says. "Bernstein would make it very clear by the look he'd give you."
Three times they stopped. Three times they tried again. With each take, Freeman got more unnerved.
That night in concert, he remembers the anxiety building toward his moment. Just before it, he lifted his hand and said a prayer: "Please God, do for me what I cannot do for myself. If people see any good in what I do, let it be You they see."
With that, Bernstein dropped his hand and Freeman reached for something deep inside.
"I just let it go, and it never had been better… couldn't be any better," Freeman says.
His old Juilliard mentor, Goodman, hugged him ba